pursuits and occupations with which we three brothers have been
accustomed, for years past, to beguile the time. Are they at all
likely, in the case of any one of us, to interest or amuse her?

My chief occupation, to begin with the youngest, consists, in
acting as steward on Owen's property. The routine of my duties
has never lost its sober attraction to my tastes, for it has
always employed me in watching the best interests of my brother,
and of my son also, who is one day to be his heir. But can I
expect our fair guest to sympathize with such family concerns as
these? Clearly not.

Morgan's pursuit comes next in order of review--a pursuit of a
far more ambitious nature than mine. It was always part of my
second brother's whimsical, self-contradictory character to view
with the profoundest contempt the learned profession by which he
gained his livelihood, and he is now occupying the long leisure
hours of his old age in composing a voluminous treatise,
intended, one of these days, to eject the whole body corporate of
doctors from the position which they have usurped in the
estimation of their fellow-creatures. This daring work is
entitled "An Examination of the Claims of Medicine on the
Gratitude of Mankind. Decided in the Negative by a Retired
Physician." So far as I can tell, the book is likely to extend to
the dimensions of an Encyclopedia; for it is Morgan's plan to
treat his comprehensive subject principally from the historical
point of view, and to run down all the doctors of antiquity, one
after another, in regular succession, from the first of the
tribe. When I last heard of his progress he was hard on the heels
of Hippocrates, but had no immediate prospect of tripping up his